


que será, será

by endlessnighttimesky



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Drunkenness, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Self-Harm, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 20:58:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17608859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlessnighttimesky/pseuds/endlessnighttimesky
Summary: All Aramis wants is to forget; wants every memory from Savoy to be buried together with the man he left there, the man he will never get to see or hold or kiss again. The man who is now six feet under together with the rest of his fallen brothers, just another rapier piercing the earth to mark the remains of yet another expendable soldier.





	que será, será

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains rather explicit descriptions of self-harm. There's no gore, nor any overly graphic descriptions of the injuries themselves, but please, look out for yourself and use discretion. For a more thorough (but spoilery) description of the self-harm depicted in this story, check the end notes.

It was inevitable.

At some point, Athos and Porthos would have to return to their duties, and Aramis would have to cope with solitude for a day or two.

Or so he thought, at least. As it turns out, the King will be traveling to Valois, and has demanded his best men to escort him. Aramis supposes he should just be grateful that Tréville somehow managed to prevent His Majesty from demanding that Aramis accompany them as well, but even so, he can't help but worry. He has yet to start trusting himself again—if it wasn't for Athos and Porthos, God knows what would become of him.

The morning before they leave, Athos and Porthos give him a long, lingering kiss each. Aramis revels in them, tries to memorize as many details as possible—the distinctive yet so similar scents they have, the feeling of their hands on his skin and in his hair, their lips on his.

Once they part, they say nothing, and Aramis is grateful. The last time he said goodbye to a loved one, they were dying in his arms. A goodbye is an ending, and Aramis cannot bear the thought of Athos or Porthos meeting the same end as Marsac. Without a goodbye, should anything happen, the last thing he ever will have shared with them would be a kiss, and if that is not the best way to send off a lover, Aramis wouldn't know what is.

But he is scared. Scared of what the solitude will do to him, and once nightfall comes, he knows his fears were motivated—by the time the sun sets over Paris, Aramis has drained an entire bottle of brandy. It's not very good, so he doesn't think Porthos will miss it too much, but even then, he cannot avoid feeling guilty. After all, together with aiming a musket, guilt is what Aramis does best.

He's half-way down a new bottle, this one filled with wine, when he remembers. Of course, he's thought of it since he came back from Savoy—he doesn't know how many hours intended for sleep that he instead spent glancing down at his right arm, tracing the rough letters inscribed half-way between shoulder and elbow with both sight and touch.

The first time he looked, he hoped it would've faded, or maybe even disappeared completely—if God had to take Aramis' lover from him, couldn't he at least do him this favor?

It is a loving God whom Aramis believes in, and the believer in him knows that if the inscription does not vanish, it is for a reason.

But Aramis has never been able to let his faith consume him. He wishes he could, sometimes—wishes he could give himself to God and renounce this soldier's life and all the pain it brings, but whenever he considers it, he sees his lovers, and knows this is where he needs to be. If he is not with them, he need not be at all.

Maybe this thought is the one that causes it all, because after all, the only difference between solitude and death is the timeframe, despite the fact that a man of the cloth would tell him that the afterlife is everything but lonely.

Aramis supposes that this is the logic that caused him to join the army instead of a seminary.

Looking up from the depths of his wineglass, Aramis sees the pile of fabric, leather, and metal at the foot of Porthos' bed—his uniform, and together with it, his weapons. His main gauche glints dully in the candlelight, and before he knows it, Aramis has crossed the room and picked it up.

A plan already forming in his mind, he sits down on the floor, back against the side of the bed—he wouldn't want to get blood all over the sheets.

The right sleeve of his shirt falls off his shoulder with a simple shrug, baring the script that now feels more like a brand than anything else—a burning imprint causing him nothing but pain.

It was his first. He still remembers being thirteen and waking up only to notice, in the corner of his eye, a patch of black on his right upper arm. Looking closer, he could see that the patch was really letters, and that they spelled out a name.

_Marsac._

The happiness he felt at finally getting his name was quickly replaced by fear, because he knew that the name you got was the one you would know your soulmate by.

Girls were never addressed by their last names, not without a formal title, and of course that was not the name you would call your soulmate by.

How he managed to hide the name from his parents for so long, he doesn't quite know, but they do say that fear can make a man do things otherwise thought to be impossible. And while hiding just one name from his family might not be considered impossible, covering up an additional two should very well be. Then again, if God were to punish Aramis for things that lay outside his control, what kind of God would he be?

Perhaps still not an all-loving one, if the imprint on his arm is anything to go by. All Aramis wants is to forget; wants every memory from Savoy to be buried together with the man he left there, the man he will never get to see or hold or kiss again. The man who is now six feet under together with the rest of his fallen brothers, just another rapier piercing the earth to mark the remains of yet another expendable soldier.

He turns his main gauche over in his hand. God will be disappointed in him, he’s sure, but at least that will make it mutual. Aramis has not spent his life trying to reconcile his faith with his life only to end up losing one of the few people he could never see himself surviving without. Yet he is grateful for Athos and Porthos, but he’s not sure God deserves the honor for that. At the very least, he knows those two won’t think He does, and Aramis would rather renounce his God altogether before he pays homage to Him for the work that is no one’s but Athos and Porthos’ own.

Aramis knows Athos still wakes up feeling unworthy, but even if Athos doesn’t, Aramis still has hope that one day, Athos will forgive himself, or that he’ll at least know that neither him nor Porthos hold his past actions against him in any way. They, if any, know what it’s like to teeter on the fine line between love and duty—which one do you put first? Aramis thinks there is no single answer, and that instead, it is simply a question of doing the right thing at the right moment. After all, no one would’ve raised an eyebrow if Athos and Porthos had simply returned to their duties once Aramis came back—except maybe the Captain. But instead they asked to be relieved until further notice, putting Aramis ahead of their commitment to king and country.

Maybe it’s not even a question of doing the right thing at the right moment, either, Aramis thinks. Maybe love and duty are not as separate as they seem.

He presses a finger to the blade of his main gauche—as the closest thing the regiment has to a field surgeon, Aramis knows that there is little worse than performing surgery with a blunt knife. Maybe if he wasn’t quite so inebriated, he’d simply fetch his surgical equipment, but then again, if he wasn’t quite so inebriated, he most likely wouldn’t be doing this in the first place.

He makes an experimental cut just above the _M_ to see how much it hurts, and judge whether he’ll need more wine to get through it—after that bottle of brandy, he highly doubts it, and once he draws blood, he’s proven right. It stings, sure, but it’s nothing compared to the improvised stitching he’s been subject to in the battlefield. Besides, his intentions are not to pierce the skin completely, or even to remove anything—he will simply make a number of well-positioned cuts, and while they might not be minimal, they certainly won’t measure up to most of the other wounds that already litter his body. A scar is nothing but a memory for a soldier.

Aramis takes a last swig of wine before he grips his main gauche and puts it to work. While he might not be the swordsman Athos is, he would not be a Musketeer if he wasn’t skilled, but even paired with the steady hands of a seasoned surgeon, being accurate with the main gauche is no easy task—the amount of brandy and wine he has so far consumed probably doesn’t improve things, either. He first tries holding the dagger in the same way he does when he uses it for its intended purpose, but the lack of precision he gets from that nothing more than tragic. He then tries gripping the blade itself, as carefully as he can, but without proper weaponry, the Musketeers wouldn’t be any better than the Red Guards—the dagger is simply too sharp to hold in such a manner, and he has no intentions of cutting up his hand as well as his arm.

Though his mind is slowed by brandy and wine, Aramis eventually remembers the sash that lies piled together with the rest of his equipment on the bed behind him. Grabbing it, he winds it around the blade until only the tip remains visible. Gripping the dagger again, he finds that while his sash might end up a bit frayed, it will definitely protect his hand for long enough to go through with what he plans to do.

Strangely satisfied with this solution, he presses his left arm to his chest to keep his hand steady, and drags the point of his main gauche diagonally over the black lines that make up the capital _M_. The process can hardly be described as a quick one, but he makes steady progress, drawing line after line over his skin until the letter can hardly be detected anymore. Once it heals, all that will be left is a patch of scars, maybe a bit mottled from the ink, but among the collection of marks already covering his body, it will hardly draw any attention. Only three— _two_ , Aramis has to remind himself, only _two_ people have ever even seen the letters written there. Those who haven’t won’t even know what to look for.

He prays that it will have healed by the time Athos and Porthos return from Valois. He knows he won’t be able to hide it from them for the rest of their lives, but if they were to confront him about it so soon after the act, he’s not sure how he would cope—because, while his actions might speak against it, this is not a thing he wants to do. Rather, it feels like he has to, if he ever wants to make it through this, if he wants to survive the sorrow and agony that descended upon him like a hazy fog that winter night, and has not lifted since.

There’s a lot of blood—more than he expected. Not feeling quite up to the task of procuring a proper bandage, once he’s done, he simply unwraps his sash from around his dagger and ties it around his arm instead. In the back of his mind, his medical training protests—the sash is nothing more but thinly woven linen, and is hardly clean enough to act as appropriate dressing for what is practically an open wound—but the rest of his mind and body loudly objects to getting up, and so, he stays right where he is, his left hand pressing the fabric against what used to be letters, but will no longer be anything else but a scar among others.

**Author's Note:**

> The self-harm in this story consists of Aramis using a knife to place a number of cuts on his upper arm in order to create a scar that covers the name of a soulmate.


End file.
